Q: You have said that one has to be “life sensitive” to experience higher dimensions of perception. What is this sensitivity? Is it something that one has to be born with, or can it be cultivated?
Should one be born with this? Though we would like to see all children as the same, you would have definitely noticed that there is a difference between one child and another. Right from the moment of birth, how they behave, how they cry, how they crawl, how they move their hands, how they look—they are different. It is foolish to think they are all the same.
They are as different as grown-ups are. Someone is born one way and someone else another way—one with a certain sense of capability, another without that sense. But life sensitivity is not decided by birth alone. You can take the pole position and still finish last or crash your car. You can be in the last and still finish first; it is possible. Birth definitely sets a certain pitch, but it is not the deciding factor. Life is the deciding factor.
Q: How does one become sensitive to life?
If you have to become sensitive to life, first of all you must become life. In 24 hours, how many moments are you functioning as a piece of life? Most of the time you are either a thought, an emotion, an idea, an opinion, a philosophy, a belief system, a relationship, or something like this. If you want to be sensitive to life, you must be life yourself.
If you can conduct your body and the process of the mind with a little distance, you will naturally become life-sensitive. Everything that we do in yoga is only to bring that life sensitivity. Only when you are sensitive to life, you are with reality. Right now you are only ego sensitive. When someone says, “I am a sensitive person”; what they are saying is, they have a very big, strong ego.
Being sensitive does not mean that you get hurt, angry or irritated for everything. If you are life sensitive, you experience every other life as yourself because you are life too. What is around you is as much life as you are. You will intrinsically know that if you are here as life. If you are here as a thought or an idea, you are completely separate from the rest of existence. If you are here as anything other than life, you are fake; you are not real.
If you want to become life-sensitive, a simple process that you can do is this: make whatever you think and feel less important. Try and see for one day. Suddenly you will feel the breeze, the rain, the flowers and the people—everything—in a completely different way. Suddenly the life in you becomes much more active and alive.
Then you become life sensitive. Once you are sensitive to this life, there is no way you will not be sensitive to other life. Because you will no longer see what you call as “myself” as just the body. If you look around, you see that what you call “me” is all over. Then you will naturally be sensitive to everything.
Becoming life-sensitive is not an exercise, ideology or philosophy. If you are life, you would be sensitive to life.
Right now you are trying to be everything other than life; that is the whole problem. You are trying to be a thought, an emotion, an idea, a conclusion, an opinion, a philosophy, an ideology and whatever else. If you just see, whatever your body, mind and emotion are saying is not important, you will suddenly become extremely sensitive to life.
Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, a bestselling author and poet. He was conferred the Padma Vibhushan in 2017. Isha.sadhguru.org